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Internet Strategy Briefing (1.4 MB PDF)
Econsultancy’s 46-page Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing, which is is free to download, covers some the most significant online trends and is recommended reading for anyone interested in digital marketing strategy.
The report, which includes case studies and examples of best practice, includes sections on customer centricity, channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.
In what's likely just the beginning of a long-term story, job listings indexed by employment search engine Indeed.com indicate that market demand for data scientists and people capable of working with "big data" took a huge leap over the last year. David Smith of Revolution Analytics performed several related queries and posted the results today on his company's blog.
The most common definition of "big data" is datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools, such as Excel. It's a soft term and is super trendy right now - but that doesn't mean the trend's not big and real.
Converting a consumer from a browser to a buyer no longer happens on a single channel, it happens across a multi-channel journey. And at each step of the way during this multi-channel journey you will have to make sure that:
- You deliver what your customer is after at that stage of their user journey, whether this is information or transactional capability.
- The touchpoint is easy to access and easy to use.
- The information you provide is accurate, consistent and relevant.
- You provide enough arguments that will make the consumer want to use your touchpoint next in their multi-channel journey (and a little incentive such as a discount may just help).
Each touchpoint can fulfil certain customer needs as part of a multi-channel customer journey and as you roll out these touchpoints you need to be clear about what its roles are.
Guy’s (unofficial) 5 steps to gaining your own stamp of approval from readers and customers:
- Validation
- Prognostication
- Social proof
- Past performance
- Personality
Check out the details and the great quotes at the source..
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) could earn as much as $14 billion from mobile-ad sales in 2015, or nearly half the $29 billion it banked in online ads combined in 2010, according to a financial research firm.
Michael was on hand to present the Accenture Technology Vision 2011, a cross-industry research project that takes stock of the evolving trends in IT and how they will impact business and society as a whole. The research team looked into 400 hypotheses based on input from scientists, architects and engineers. They found fifty that held true, which they consolidated into eight trends:
- Data takes its rightful place as a platform.
- Analytics is driving a discontinuous evolution from business intelligence.
- Cloud computing will create more value higher up the stack.
- Architecture will shift from server-centric to service-centric.
- IT security will respond rapidly, progressively—and in proportion.
- Data privacy will adopt a risk-based approach.
- Social platforms will emerge as a new source of business intelligence.
- User experience is what matters.
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| In contrast to more expensive advertising destinations like AOL and Yahoo! where CPMs can be $15 – $25 or even higher, Facebook is reportedly hovering at somewhere between $4 and $8. |
| The last finding from this report that stood out was that newspaper advertising dollars appears to be the greatest source of Facebook’s growth. |
Related articles Zemanta helped me add links & pictures to this email. It can do it for you too.
The whole report is downloadable as a 50-odd page PDF here, but we've pulled out the best charts for you. They're fascinating.
But where it's most striking is how much it contributes to GDP growth: 21% in mature countries, more in the past 5 years than previously.
Image: McKinsey Global Institute
The Internet has a 3.4% share of GDP in the countries McKinsey analyzed
Image: McKinsey Global Institute
Countries that create strong Internet ecosystems reap huge economic benefits
Image: McKinsey Global Institute
Firstly, good designers don't tend to think about consumers; they think about people and what they want and need. It's a subtle point, but thinking about people as consumers immediately dehumanizes them and makes it harder to empathize.
Secondly, good designers like observing — really looking at what people do rather than simply relying on what they say they do. As Paul Smith once explained, when asked where he got his ideas from: "You and I could walk down the street together and look at the same things, but I'd SEE ten times more than you would."
Thirdly, they bring expertise in other categories and industries to bear on problems in others. They pull together threads from different functions, disciplines, fields, and sectors, and integrate them into a new and (the dreaded word) "holistic" understanding.
Fourthly, good designers look at what might all change in the short, medium and long-term, by engaging with the best trends and forecasting intelligence. Unlike other crystal ball gazers they use this prescience to help them understand how they could bend the future, shape it to their vision.
And lastly, good designers pressure test their conclusions by consulting with other cultural 'interpreters' from a broad range of other disciplines.
What good management comprises — what bosses do to make their people productive — isn't really a mystery. We can argue about the exact wording, but the basic elements aren't in doubt. We've summarized them in what we call the "3 Imperatives": Manage yourself, manage your network, manage your team. In writing about these elements, we've described them in terms of what good managers do and what all managers should strive to do. But it's not hard to rephrase them from a direct report's point of view — in effect, a "Direct Reports' Bill of Rights" — as follows.
Every direct report should be able to expect that the boss will:
Apple’s cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter. Cash increased by $6.1 billion.
The increase in cash is net of approximately $900 million for prepayments and capital expenditures related to the strategic supply agreements that Apple announced last quarter.
The following chart shows the historic cash, short-term and long-term liquid assets Apple holds.
The enormity of the overall size of this cash can be put into several perspectives:
Account Planning in Digital Age
What is media planning?
The brief in the post digital age
Why planners and creatives should become best friends
Planning Needs Some Planning
Seven Deadly Sins
AdAge Digital 2010 6 Foundations of Great Digital Creative
The Birth Of A Grand Strategist By Waqar Riaz
The future of advertising, a conversation
Digital Media Planning 2010
The truth is there's only so much designers can do on their own to make a company successfully innovative. Companies that misalign their expectations — and many do ignore their own part in becoming more innovative — generally fail. They genuinely want good design, and they want it to impact their bottom line, but they want it to take place externally. Their vision of design as a purely third-party service is doomed.
This misalignment expresses itself in many forms. Here are five of the most common ways to fail at design:
- Refuse to change any other part of your business. Treating design as an add-on can work when a company commissions a "designer series" of products to briefly boost the brand's appeal, but this is hardly what we mean when we talk about innovation saving your business. The smartest companies foster an internal culture of innovation, which creative consultants can support, but only if other aspects of the business — management, development, manufacturing, marketing — are open to change. More immediately, requiring a design team to propose only solutions that can be realized with your current process ensures more of the same.
- Design outside of your innovation space. Designers don't implement solutions, companies do. For that reason, the most innovative solution on earth won't work if it's pursued by a company that can't properly execute it. At Ziba we call this capability the client's "innovation space" — the arena in which they've already proven themselves willing and able to lead the pack. Some companies are technology innovators, others are product innovators or experience innovators. Learning which you are in order to direct later efforts is a crucial first step that most companies skip.
- Try to design for everybody. Design works as a differentiator because it responds to human needs, both functional and emotional. Most of us agree that a Ferrari is beautifully designed, but nobody would say it's for everyone. The same could be true of a minivan. Each succeeds in its market because it delivers to a tightly defined group of users. In a landscape where consumers increasingly demand tailored experiences, failing to identify a clear strategic target is designing to fail. The most useful tool a client can give a consultancy is a well-considered, focused profile of who they're designing for. The least useful is a mandate to create something that appeals to everyone.
- Insist on replicating another company's success. "We want to be the Apple of [insert industry]" might be the single most common request clients make of creative consultancies, and it's certainly one of the most damaging. Good design does more than just serve the needs of its audience, it does so in a way that's true to the company's purpose and values. An Apple-like experience delivered by a company that isn't Apple can't be sustained, because it's not backed up by Apple's culture and resources. The result is an inconsistent experience that feels disingenuous to customers, and shatters their loyalty. This is why "me too" innovation almost never works. Not only does it make you look like a copycat, it shows you don't care about your own brand enough to express it in your user experience.
- Compartmentalize design into isolated tasks. It's tempting to treat design as a menu of services, applying it here and there on bits of a project that need sprucing up. To a skeptical client this can feel economical and controlled, but it cripples the design effort by fragmentation. The best user experiences are integrative; they make sure that every touch point is consistent and logical, building trust from the user, and reinforcing the brand's character. Piecemeal design work creates an incoherent experience that users will ultimately reject.
Some key points:
- Kids consume a heck of a lot of media--and more all the time. Basically, if kids are awake, they're consuming media. And, increasingly, they're consuming multiple forms of media at the same time.
- Kids' print media consumption is tiny and falling.
- Kids' digital media consumption is going through the roof.
No big surprise there. What is a surprise is how little parents seem to care about this. (Or, alternatively, how much parents encourage this media consumption by consuming a huge amount of media themselves.)
- In 2/3 of households, TVs are on during meals
- In 75% of households, TVs are on when no one is watching them.
- More than 70% of kids have TVs in their bedrooms
- Only 1/3 of households have media-consumption rules
No surprise, more media is consumed in households in which TVs are always on, where there are no media consumption rules, and where kids have TVs in their bedrooms.
And, no surprise, kids who consume the most media get the worst grades (but is this cause or effect?)
It's a long presentation, but it's awesome.
Flip through the presentation here >
- Business and Finance: Engagement peaks on Wednesday and Thursday, though this industry tends to spread its posts even on Monday through Friday.
Tip: Post on Wednesday.
The findings for the retail vertical.- Retail: Sunday is a big day for engagement on the shopping and retail front, but only 5% of entertainment posts go up on Sunday. The industry’s posts lean heavily toward Friday, which has below-average engagement.
Tip: Target shoppers on Sunday.
- Fashion: Engagement peaks on Thursday, but dips on the weekend. The industry pushes the most content on Tuesday, the day with the lowest engagement.
Tip: Optimize engagement on Thursday.
- Healthcare and Beauty: Like fashion — perhaps because consumers are shopping and preparing for the weekend — healthcare and beauty brands see the most engagement on Thursday. But a lot of content is posted on Mondays and Fridays, when engagement is lower.
Tip: Post content on Thursday.
- Food and Beverage: More than the other verticals, the food and beverage brands do a good job of spreading their posts throughout the week and weekend. But in this case, engagement peaks on Tuesday and Saturday and dips on Monday and Thursday.
Tip: Target Tuesday.
- Sports: Not surprisingly, especially during football season, Sunday is king for sports brands and teams on Facebook. This data is affected by the fact that Super Bowl Sunday fell during the data collection period, but Sundays remain strong during other weeks, too.
Tip: Increase your post volume on Sunday.
- Travel and Hospitality: The highest engagement occurs on Thursday and Friday, when the week is winding down and people are looking to escape from the office.
Tip: Get these eyeballs at the end of the week.
Joe Ciarallo, Buddy Media’s director of communications, says a lot of smart brands already target their audiences when they’re most engaged. For those who don’t, Ciarallo says they should consider scheduling Facebook posts to go live during times of high engagement at night and on weekends.
Be Concise
The data indicates that the length of the post can determine engagement just as much as the time of the post. The bottom line: Keep it short and sweet. Posts with 80 characters or less — the length of a short tweet — garnered 27% more engagement than posts that were more than 80 characters. But brevity is far from a common practice — only 19% of posts in the study were shorter than 80 characters.
And while the content should be short, the URL probably shouldn’t be — posts with a full-length URL had three times the engagement of their shortened bit.ly, ow.ly and tinyurl counterparts. The reason is likely because readers want to know where the link will take them. Ciarallo says a brand-specific URL shortener, like bddy.me or on.mash, keeps a post short while also providing context.
Ask For Engagement
Words ranked in order of their effectiveness at converting Likes and comments.If you’re looking to get Likes on a post, all you have to do is ask. Ciarallo says simple, outright instructions — “Like us if…” — are much more effective at getting a Like than a post with a long explanation of why you should “like” something. Remember, “liking” only takes one click and then the “liked” item is syndicated on a user’s own page, so don’t be afraid to ask for the thumbs up.
The same goes for comments — outright saying “post,” “comment” or “tell us” motivates fans to engage. If you’re seeking answers, put a simple “where” or “when” or “would” question at the end of the post — you’ll get 15% more engagement than if the question is buried in the middle. Shy away from “why” questions, as they seem invasive and ask much more of a user than a “what” question, Ciarallo says.
McKinsey observed in a 2009 study that 20% of the businesses active in social media were reaping 80% of the benefit. No mystery but there was a correlation between the level of activity in social media and the business value achieved. This chart summarizes the path that many brands take. It will last years.
The checkout process is a popular area of your site to test, and for good reason. When a visitor has added items to cart and clicks the “proceed to checkout” button, it’s a good indication of purchase intent! But often carts are abandoned early in the process – even at the login screen. Your design and copy on this page have a major impact on whether customers figure out which option is right for them (sign in, create account or guest checkout) and make it smoothly through to the next step.
As I’ve written about before, Amazon and Sears’ radio button approach is likely the “path of least resistance.” But if you want to test for yourself, the following is an inspiration gallery of 4 different approaches to log in: the aforementioned radio button, two-option, three-option and expanded/one-page.
Must read for anyone involved in usability and web design..
